Sandy wasn’t a brave pegasus. She earned her dust devil cutie mark pushing trouble away, not rushing towards it. Still, there was an odd thrill to their high-speed flight on Princess Twilight’s self-pulling sky chariot. Thrilling, yes. But it didn’t stop her from screaming in absolute terror.
After all, they were being chased through the sky by hundreds of deranged pegasi.
“They must be converted or they must be destroyed!”
Oh, right. It was also Princess Cadence who was leading the frothing feathered herd behind them. But it wasn’t the Princess Cadence that Sandy knew and loved, with her calming smile and her eternal quest for peace.
“Take the Princess and the Crystal Empress. Kill the rest!” bellowed the Goddess of Love.
Sandy screamed again.
“Sandy, darling? I enjoy a bit of theatrics as much as the next mare, but hush a bit while Twilight’s concentrating, okay?”
A spiraled beam of magic, made of cornflower blue and deep red, almost black, energy splashed against their magical shield. It wavered.
Twilight grunted in pain as she navigated the chariot through the swarm of enraged pegasi. “Rarity!”
Rarity looked around at the frothing pegasi around them. The near constant bursts of twisted magic from the corrupted goddess of love. Then she looked at her friend.
“The shield!” as soon as she said it, Twilight’s shield blipped out of existence and their minds were filled with voices.
Whispers on the edge of sanity became a roaring upheaval of command and response, a sea of declarations all calling out for one thing: Obedience to order. Instinct took over and Rarity’s mind and body plunged within the crystalline shell of her second form; the avatar of her grand empire. In her crystalline form, the shouts returned to a whisper, her mind now protected from malicious influences. She was able to think straight once more. Just in time to feel her stomach drop out from under her. Their flying chariot was now a falling chariot.
Rarity looked around at the pained faces of the ponies around her. The three girls were starting to lose color in their cheeks as they tumbled through the air screaming gibberish of their own. Quick Name had his hooves over his ears as he roared indignantly at the cascade of pegasi flapping madly in a suicide dive to catch them.
At the head of the living downpour of frothy madness was one rather disheveled looking Alicorn, biting and gnashing at the air as if that would help her catch her tumbling prey. Rarity’s eyes began to glow and the chariot was wrapped in a transparent wall of perfect crystal.
Twilight, able to think clearly again, began the process of righting the chariot. Soon hooves were back on wood, and all screaming subsided. Except for little Sandy, who found a way to shriek in new and exciting octaves.
Their chariot took off with a shot and soon they were pulling away from the horde of corrupted fliers. The relative safety of Cloudsdale as it came into view, less than a mile away.
“What the hay happened back there?” asked Honeycrisp
“I think the Beacon zapped Princess Cadence!” said a visibly shaken Smarty Pants.
“Oh, you think so, Pants? Of course the Beacon zapped the Princess! I mean, why was she waiting for us with all those pegasi? I’ve never seen so many in one place.”
Twilight was leaning against the forward railing of her sky chariot urging it to go even faster with her potent magical powers. Quick Name put a hoof up to Sandy’s muzzle and managed to get the frantic filly to stop yelling at the top of her lungs. He turned to his employer with a stern look in his eyes.
“Princess, we should turn back and head for Canterlot while we still can.”
Smarty Pants sprang up from her seated position at this. “No! No, we can’t turn back. We need to find out what happened to Princess Luna! We have to find her if we want to stop the Beacon of Order.”
“But—”
Twilight cut off the captain of her Arcane Guard before he could continue. “Smarty Pants is right, Quick Name. We need to find Luna and Celestia and we need to do it soon. This is our only lead and we have to chance it.”
Quick Name tried again, “But I’m—“
A blast of twisted magic pinged off their shield and Rarity let out a hiss of pain, gripping her head. The shield held.
“Oh my, that certainly packs a wallop, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” nodded Twilight sympathetically. “She’s not pulling any punches with that magic of hers. I couldn’t get us to go any faster while I had the shield up. But now that you’ve got that, I can focus on speed. We’ll be landing in a few minutes.”
Smarty Pants sat back down on her rump and nervously clapped her forehooves together. “So, Princess. What’s the plan?”
Twilight looked up from the little filly in time to have the chariot dodge a volley of corrupted magic. “Plan. Right. Okay, first: Cloudwalking. Zap.”
Smarty suppressed a giggle as she felt a tickle in her hooves. She wanted to show the Princess that she could keep her head in a tense situation. Quick Name though, fell over laughing.
“No no,” he panted between pangs of surprisingly girlish laughter, “n-not the hooves! Ha ha ha, anything b-but the h-hooves!”
“Second: We land.” When she said ‘land’ the chariot began to rumble as its runners came in contact with the dense cloud ground of Cloudsdale’s main runway. The chariot slowed as it moved along the soft ground, but it did not stop. Princess Cadence and her corrupted pegasi were closing in.
“Third: Thought shields. Wum.” A purplish tint came over the world, and Sandy looked around at her friends. Each of them had a purple bubble around their head. “These should stop most of the whispers from getting into your head.”
“Is it necessary to say the sound effects when you cast a spells?” asked Honeycrisp.
“Yes. It makes the magic better.”
“But—“
Twilight’s right eye twitched and she stared down at the little red filly. She pointedly tapped a hoof to her chest for emphasis. “Goddess. Of. Magic.”
Rarity leaned down and whispered to the confused Apple. “Try not to antagonize her, sweetie. She gets a little… eccentric in high stress situations.”
Honeycrisp puffed out her cheeks and let the air out like a deflating balloon.
“Fourth: Rarity and I will deal with Cadence and the pegasi, the rest of you stay together and start looking for clues. Your first stop should be the Cloudsdale Tribune’s records archive on Third and Mane. It should be on the top floor.”
Honeycrisp, unaware or unworried about the bear she was continually poking, spoke up. “Wait a minute, why should we—“
“JUST GO!”
Twilight’s booming command was reiterated by a blast that struck the chariot, shattering it and flinging its former occupants through the air. They landed unharmed on the sponge-cake like ‘ground’ and the three girls and their guardian ran off deep into the heart of Cloudsdale.
Twilight and Rarity were the first to recover. Twilight looked to her old friend and nodded in the direction of the Coliseum. No other words were exchanged, and the two ancient ponies galloped off.
A vicious pink blur and most of the pegasi followed them, but a few dozen stragglers turned to follow the four ponies running towards the commercial district. Working quickly, Twilight summoned a wall of thick clouds to close off the street her little ponies had run down. They’d be on their own from here on out.
Not stopping to chat, Twilight turned her head to the pony running next to her. “Rarity, I need you to hold off Cadence as long as you can. I’ll take the pegasi. I’m not done analyzing how the Beacon’s Memetic Harmonization works.”
Rarity nodded and she came to a stop, turning in a dainty little half-circle. Then she leapt with all the strength of a mare scorned and careened into Princess Cadence before the latter could change course. They both tumbled to the cloud-ground. The other pegasi raced on towards their purple foe.
Panting, Cadence rolled to get back on to her hooves and launched a flurry of red and blue magical bolts at Rarity. “Ah, the Crystal Empress. You will be a grand champion for our cause.” She focused her mental energies at Rarity. Nothing happened. Cadence blinked unhappily.
“Why aren’t you moved by The Voice?”
“Two voices in my head is more than enough, thank you.”
That was a dig at me, wasn’t it?
Perish the thought, darling.
Rarity danced and dodged her way around the bolts with grace. “So, tell me Cadence, how are you? Besides crazy and possessed of course.”
Cadence snarled and sprang at the former Element of Generosity. One step ahead of her, Rarity dived away from the enraged Goddess of Love. She trying to keep her on edge and off balance for a long as possible.
Rarity knew that she could handle crazy. It was when Cadence had a chance to think that she was her most dangerous. Rarity was trying to avoid that at all costs.
“And Shining Armor? How’s he doing, hmm? Still running around with those skimpy little succubae in Tartarus?”
Cadence roared as she got into melee range of the infuriating white pony and spun around to buck with all of her might. All she hit was cloud.
“Careful, Cadence careful!” Admonished Rarity, “If you keep that up you’ll throw your hip out of joint. You simply must be more careful, what with being a mare of such… advanced age.”
Twilight Sparkle was enjoying herself more than she’d care to admit. She was sure she was going to beat this Memetic Harmonization. The trick was coming up with the right counter spell components for her magic to get through without triggering the adaptation response. She summoned her notebook and a quill out of the ether and stopped running.
Moments later the buzzing sound on the edge of her senses became a roar. The air around her became filled with pegasi. Hundreds of them. Each one of them was either chanting, droning, or screaming. Beacon this; Order that. Really it was just background noise at this point, thanks to her thought shielding spell.
She took a calming breath and closed her eyes. She couldn’t afford to cast the silencing spell on herself out here. Unlike the telegraph office, where there were less than a dozen of them all in one place, here she was surrounded by scores of corrupted ponies.
Plus she needed to keep an ear out for Rarity and the others if any of them needed help. She had her mental shield in place and renewed the magic on the shields of her friends. She’d just have to get them to stop their gibberish some other way.
Looking through her notes, she absentmindedly erected a defensive bubble around herself. It wouldn’t stop magic, but it would stop physical attacks. Since these were pegasi, that should have be enough.
Most of the corrupted ponies were content with talking at her. Only a few were attacking. On their own, each corrupted pony would meet their match with a particularly lively foal. No, without their mind control powers, they weren’t dangerous unless there was a large enough crowd of them.
“Ah! Here it is.” Twilight had found the page of the notes she took when she first encountered the corrupted ponies. She focused her magic and a beam of purple energy shot from her horn and hit the closest pegasus, a white mare by the looks of it. It was the same blast she first used against the ponies in the telegraph office. Under normal circumstances, it would do little more than administer a small shock to the system. She was expecting it to do nothing.
Instead it hit the pegasus, and she fell to the ground, asleep.
Curious.
Her notepad and quill blazed with life, writing at a frantic pace. Memetic Harmonization should have adapted to that attack. But it didn’t. Could it be that it only works within a certain area of effect? Did Celestia or Luna ever test to see if the Memetic Harmonization retained its properties over vast geographical distances?
She charged a second shot and hit a pegasus standing right next to her. As expected it did nothing. She looked all around and saw a straggler at the tail end of the group. It would be a tricky shot but… She fired off a third identical shot at the distant pony.
The pony dropped to the ground.
“Ha!” Twilight smiled broadly and excitedly clapped her front hooves together.
Thinking of another spell, the mustache one, she aimed her shot at a would-be assassin kicking ineffectually at her left foreleg. Before she fired the shot, she reached beyond the realm of the physical world, and opened her sixth sense. Here floating between the world of the real and the ever-flowing tides of magic.
She didn’t dare delve deeper into the magical realm now, she didn’t want the Beacon to touch her psyche again. Not when she was so close to discovering its downfall. She focused on the unfortunate soul in front of her. An orange pegasus with a white mane. She felt his magical signature. She studied it and wrote relevant notes in her notebook. Then she cast her spell. In the physical world, the pony suddenly grew a handlebar mustache, and then fell over asleep.
In the flowing magical realm that mirrored the real, Twilight watched as her spell flowed through circuits of magic, coiling and flowing from the tip of her horn to the muzzle of her latest test subject. She had long ago memorized the structure of her spells and she knew what she could expect to happen when it reached the stallion. The spell hit the stallion and it began to unravel itself like an intricately wound ball of ribbon or a long scroll. But as it unravelled, a barrier of light pinged off the stallion from the impact spot of her spell.
The barrier let it through, but Twilight marveled as she watched how the barrier created many duplicates of the mustache spell, but mirrored, in a way. Each duplicate was like the petal of a sunflower, spreading from the point at which the spell entered the stallion’s barrier. The petal grew and grew, and each time it touched another pegasus, the blooming process started all over again.
She tracked it as it leapt from pony to pony. She was surprised to see that a single spell would only spread six generations. When it reached the sixth generation, it would not spread beyond that.
She charged the spell again with a flash of will and hit one of the first generation pegasi. The spell had no effect, but it did not blossom again. She smiled. Twilight pulled her consciousness back fully into the physical world and plopped down to look at her notes. Suddenly, there was a loud thud, and she looked up and saw Rarity’s face pressed up again her barrier.
“Rarity! I think I figured out how to stop their adaptation! I just have to stop the blossoms!”
Rarity, her eyes rolling around in her head, nodded thoughtfully. “That’s cycling, Applejack. Now if you’ll pardon me, I’m not feeling all that butter.” And she slid down the side of Twilight’s barrier into a heap.
Realizing that something was wrong, Twilight lowered her shield and wrapped her unconscious friend in a hug.
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about her, sister.”
Twilight looked up with wide eyes at the wickedly grinning pink Alicorn.
“I would worry about me instead.” Cadence said as she took a step forward.
Twilight Re-raised her protective shield, still cradling the delirious Rarity in her forelegs.
“You know that little shield of yours won’t stop me right, Twilight?” Cadence scoffed, “It won’t stop any of us. We’re all of one mind; one purpose. We are going to bring down Discord once and for all. Isn’t that exciting?”
Twilight ignored her royal sister’s rambling as best she could as she focused her restorative magics on the unconscious Rarity.
Cadence continued. “I mean, sure he and Shining Armor have been poker buddies forever, but that doesn’t excuse him of being chaos incarnate. He has to be destroyed.”
Twilight couldn’t take it anymore. “Why Cadence? Why does Discord have to be destroyed, Cadence?”
“Why? WHY! Because it’s my purpose. Our purpose. Oh I thought I knew from purpose, being the Goddess of Love and all, but this?” she let out a contented sigh, “This is the real deal, Twilight.”
The pink Alicorn took a few steps closer. “Can’t you see that your struggling is pointless, Twilight? Join us… join me, and together with the Beacon, we can rule from a shared throne of absolute Order!”
“Don’t we already rule Equestria?”
“Don’t you backsass me, I—”
“You’re not Cadence! Cadence wouldn’t risk the fate of the world to stop a threat that doesn’t even exist. You’re a puppet, dancing on a string.” Twilight closed her eyes and let out a breath. “That doesn’t make what I’m about to do any easier though.” She began casting one of her most powerful spells.
“From one to another,”
“You dare insult me?” sputtered Cadence indignantly, “Insult the righteous cause of Order? Discord will be stopped. Chaos will be broken under the rule of law, never again to rise.”
“Another to one.”
She took another step. She was practically standing on top of the two former Elements of Harmony at this point. “You’ve always been the pragmatic one, Twilight. Can’t you see what I see? If you can’t, allow me to… open your eyes.”
A red glow spilled out from Cadence’s eyes, and a wave of twisted blue and red magic washed over Twilight’s shield. The voices were coming again. Shouting in Twilight’s head. It didn’t matter, her spell was almost complete.
Twilight looked up at her sister and shouted out the rest of the ancient incantation. “A mark of one's destiny singled out alone, fulfilled!”
A wave of purple energy exploded out of the Goddess of Magic, booming through the air and leveling cloud buildings for blocks. Soon the air was filled with the sound of unconscious pegasi falling to the soft foam-like ground. What could be seen of Cadence’s still-breathing body was quickly covered up in a growing pile of feathers, hooves, and newly adorned flanks.
She didn’t know any of these pegasi, but she knew that Star Swirl the Bearded’s ancient spell had worked. She could tell by the chain reaction of cutie marks being swapped between owners as the blast wave of the spell continued to radiate up and out. Also from the faint sizzling sound that the transformation left behind. That was new.
She watched it until it passed the last of the corrupted pegasi, then focused her magic on ending the spell, to stop it from radiating out further than was strictly necessary. For a short while there was silence. Then finally, Twilight felt a stirring in the Empress in her hooves.
Rarity sat up, rubbing the top of her head. “Oh my, what hit me?”
“Princess Cadence.”
“Truly?” asked Rarity as she rubbed the back of her head, looking around at the devastation around her. “So then this wasn’t all some sort of horrid dream?”
Twilight shook her head.
Rarity’s hooves moved from her head to her rump, and absentmindedly rubbed at her cutie mark. “Twilight… Why are my haunches warm?” The Crystal Empress looked down at her delivery box cutie mark and tapped a hoof to it again, puzzled by the warmth it exuded.
Twilight tried very hard not to laugh, holding it in as best as she could. “O-oh, is it? G-gosh, that’s, ha, that’s really-y strange.”
Rarity looked around and at all the pegasi, sleeping soundly. Some of them were still falling out of the air. “What did you do?”
“I used Star Swirl the Bearded’s old cutie mark swapping spell. I was aiming for Cadence, figuring I needed a very powerful spell to break through to her, but I guess it hit everypony else too. I wasn’t expecting to get more than maybe a hooffull of ponies… Why did it affect all of you?”
Rarity sat up and stared at her oldest friend in the world. Then she squinted suspiciously. “All of ‘you’, Twilight?”
She thrust a hoof at Twilight’s cutie mark. The Alicorn goddess’ wings flared and her eyes bugged out of her head.
“Rarity! Your hooves are like ice! What are yo—“
“Twilight, your cutie mark is not unusually warm. I’m a creature of ice and crystal. My cutie mark is sizzling. The cutie marks of the ponies around us are sizzling.”
Twilight laughed nervously. “Boy, is all this conjecture making anypony else thirsty? I could really go for a—“
Suddenly a pink hoof shoots out of a pile of snoozing pegasi, followed by a whole lot of cursing and screaming. Soon Princess Cadence has made her way to the top of the pile. Panting and with unsteady movements, she took up a defensive stance. Twilight and Rarity wheeled back instinctively, putting several feet between themselves and the reawakened goddess.
“What did you do to me? What am I?” she swung her head around drunkenly and begun to chase her tail. “Why is my cutie mark a lollypop?”
Cadence’s eyes twitched continuously, sometimes glowing blue, sometimes glowing red. Sometimes there was no glow at all. She turned to face the two conscious ponies and began stumbling in their direction.
Twilight stumbled backwards and pushed herself away from Cadence with each uneasy step she took. “This isn’t right… You shouldn’t know what your cutie mark used to be. You shouldn’t even be awake!”
Cadence jerked upright and her eyes took on a solid red glow. Twilight felt a presence join them that she was already all too familiar with.
“She knows because I know.” The voice belonged to the Beacon of Order, but it came from Cadence’s mouth. “All my converts are of one mind, after all.”
“Let Cadence go!” Twilight sneered.
“And give up the second most powerful weapon in my arsenal? Never. I’m afraid if you want her back, you’re going to have to kill her.” The fully possessed Goddess of Lollypops fired a red beam of energy from her horn so suddenly that Twilight didn’t have time to put up a new barrier. It hit her square in the chest and sent her spiraling through the air, into the ruined cloudwall behind her.
The Beacon of Order laughed heartily. “Oh, this is fun! I should have taken total control of her the minute I converted her. Do you have any idea how powerful being an Alicorn makes you?”
Cadence happily trotted over to the crater. “Well, I suppose you do.” A second red beam slammed into Twilight, burying her further in the cloudy rubble.
Cadence’s possessed body began to summon a tremendous amount of energy into her horn. “Well, it’s been fun, it really has. But I have a Dark God of Chaos to put down. So you’ll excuse me if I cut this short.”
As the Beacon prepared to fire his final strike on the downed Twilight Sparkle, pain filled the possessed Alicorn’s being. There was no explosion, there was no burst of red light. There was a only a tinkling sound, followed by a soft pop. It was the soft pop that hurt so bad.
When the Beacon could manage it, it looked up at Cadence’s horn above her head, and was shocked to see that her horn had been completely encased in crystal. The Beacon fired again, and again there was the soft popping sound, followed by the gut-wrenching pain.
“If you want to hurt Twilight, then you’ll have to go through me.”
The Beacon willed Cadence’s body to turn and face the crystalline armored Empress. Rarity glared at the abomination with both poise and determination.
Cadence’s face shuddered into a smile. Her wings jutted out of her back, spread as far as possible. “If you think stopping up an Alicorn’s magic makes her any less dangerous, you’ve got a painful lesson ahead of you.”
Before Rarity could respond there was a blur of motion and she felt a whole new world of pain explode in her ribs. Where she’d been standing before now loomed Cadence, lollypop goddess of war, back hooves extended in a buck.
Luckily for Rarity, she had the foresight to don her crystalline form before caging Cadence’s magic, otherwise she’d surely be a pink smear in the sky by now. She stumbled back from the blow and righted herself. The air around them began to drop in temperature and soon both ponies could see their breath. Slowly, Rarity began to shift and change, growing taller with each passing moment. Soon she was a head again as tall as Princess Cadence, her horn was capped with a wicked blade of ice.
“Mistake number one was possessing my friend.” Rarity’s voice echoed and boomed like the bitter wind through the tundra “Mistake number two was hurting Twilight.”
She slammed a forehoof into the ground. A jagged wall of ice rippled along the clouds at her feet, and bit into Cadence’s left side, dropping her to her knees.
“Your final mistake was attacking me. You may have possessed a goddess of love, but I am the Empress of Ice. Your betrayal ends here.”
The Beacon of Order willed Cadence’s body to her hooves and scoffed. But before it could say anything else, an icy limb shot out of the ground beneath her, sending the possessed Alicorn tumbling through the air once more. Landing with a thud, the Beacon looked out of swollen eyes to see a creature it had never before encountered.
Pulling itself out of cloudbank was a massive translucent ice beast. It was feline in nature, but the largest cat the Beacon had ever seen. Each massive paw was as big around as a pony’s head and was filled with razor-sharp claws. Two saw-like teeth, more like tusks, jutted menacingly out of its otherwise aerodynamic head. The creature’s red eyes glowed like old embers, simmering with barely contained aggression. Its four mighty limbs and sleek body rippled with muscle in a way that the Beacon associated with jungle cats, not with… whatever this was.
“Opal dear?” Rarity cooed from behind her summoned monstrosity, “Mommy needs you to deal with a rat. Can you do that for me, sweetie?”
The beast named Opal, turned to its creator and nuzzled her affectionately, purring playfully at an impossibly low octave. Then without further warning, the creature was bounding across the clouds towards its prey.
Twilight woke up with the worst headache she’d had in recent memory. She tried to sit up, but she was immediately beset with pain. Gingerly, she looked over her shoulder at her left wing. It was stripped almost bare, and broken in tatters as it hung awkwardly from her side. Left to heal on it’s own, it would be years, possibly even decades before she’d ever fly again.
“Shoot.” She grumbled.
Once again she found herself applying her healing magics, only this time to her mangled wing. It hurt like the dickens as the bone and tissue knit itself back together, to say nothing about re-growing all the necessary plumage. She summoned her saddlebags out of the small dimensional pocket she keeps such everyday items in, and put the salvageable feathers in one of the compartments.
After all, what better quill was there than a feather from the Goddess of Magic? She gave her newly-restored wing a few simple flaps. Satisfied with the results, Twilight stood up in her cloudy crater and stretched the rest of her.
It was then that she looked up in time to see one of Rarity’s infamous ice-ligers fly through the air and smash into the rubble above her. Which then exploded into a sea of snow. Which, of course, fell onto the purple Princess and buried her in several feet of icy slush.
The possessed body of Cadence was breathing shallow ragged breaths. The Beacon of Order had overestimated the combat abilities of the Alicorn body. Controlling it was doubly difficult for the Beacon, since Cadence’s mind had fallen into a deep sleep after Twilight’s cutie mark changing spell.
Rarity on the other hoof, stood as regal as the day of her coronation as Empress of the Crystal Empire. Not a hair out of place, not a limp or stumble in her stride, nor a crack in her crystalline armor. Too bad it was just a ruse. The ice-liger was her trump card. She knew she couldn’t take Cadence on her own. She just hoped that she had bought enough time for… something to happen.
A guttural roar issued from Cadence’s mouth, and the puppet ruler charged haphazardly across the rubble strewn Cloudsdale street towards Rarity. She lowered her head and aimed her crystal encased horn for the white unicorn’s chest. Rarity stood her ground.
At the last possible moment, Rarity shifted to the left and spun about, earning a nasty gash on the right side of her neck that ran all the way down to her flank. But her gambit paid off. Cadence’s body flailed and fell as she tried to move her unresponsive hind end. The back half of the Goddess of Love was encased in ice.
Not-Cadence continued to scream in her incoherent rage. She slammed her forehooves and head against her ice prison, earning herself nasty cuts and welts for her trouble. Not that the Beacon cared. It could not feel the pain of the ponies it controlled. It cared little for their injuries, just results.
“You just don’t know when to quit do you?” Rarity asked while the long cut along her side was covered with a new seam of crystal. “Well, fine by me. I could do this all day.”
We can?
No. I’m bluffing.
“You’re bluffing!” snarled the Beacon of Order through his Alicorn mouthpiece.
“Try me.” Rarity threatened.
You’re not bluffing?
Yes, I am! Just… can we not do this right now?
With a mighty grunt, the mind-controlled Cadence freed herself of the ice and flapped both wings in a single mighty swoop. She performed a tight loop in the air and dove at Rarity as fast as her Alicorn body would allow her too. Rarity took a step back and stumbled. She knew there was no getting away from this final attack. Rarity closed her eyes.
A moment later she opened her eyes and she was confused. Alive, but confused. Cadence was hovering in the air, staring off into the city, her eyes wide with fear.
“Luna.” The Beacon’s voice whispered from her throat.
Rarity was unsure of what the Beacon had said, but then she felt the ground rumble, and thought that she heard a voice echoing from the direction that Cadence was staring in. She looked too, her curiosity overcoming her.
Both ponies have forgotten about the other for the moment. Rarity just stood and Cadence's body just flapped. Both staring off into the distance until a new voice interrupts their impromptu time-out.
“What are you two looking at?”
Rarity and Cadence whipped their heads around to look at the snow covered Princess Twilight. She was craning her neck to look beyond the two of them into the city. Cadence’s body tensed, and the Beacon of Order cursed under her breath, turning to flee from the two ponies.
Twilight called out in alarm about Cadence getting away, and Rarity just did what came naturally to her… what her cutie mark was telling her to do. She put Cadence in a box.
Well, not a box. More like a crystal cage. It jutted out of the dense cloud ground and pulled the Alicorn right out of the air before she could build up speed. Rarity channeled the last of her magic and firmly rooted Cadence’s body to the ground.
Unable to hold back anymore, Rarity collapsed to her knees and the crystalline armor melted away, revealing a smaller, bruised, and battered unicorn.
Twilight turned to her friend and scooped her up. “Rarity!” she cried.
Rarity winced in her embrace. “Gah! Twilight whatever possessed you to pick me up and then shout at me?”
Instinctively, Twilight released her friend. Rarity promptly fell to the ground in a uneven pile.
“Oh gosh, sorry!” Twilight moved to pick her friend back up but Rarity stuck out a twitching hoof to stop her.
“DON’T TOUCH ME! I mean… ha ha, I’m fine. I like it here. On the ground... Don’t touch me.”
Twilight grumbled to herself about ‘only wanting to help’ but Rarity was too focused on not being trampled, gored, and shouted at to care. A tingling sensation washed over Rarity and she knew that Twilight’s healing magic was doing its… well, magic.
When Rarity was well enough to stand, she saw Twilight inspecting Cadence’s body in her crystal cage. “Smart.” She said nodding to Cadence’s horn. “How did you know that your crystal would be strong enough to restrain an Alicorn’s magic?”
Rarity sauntered over to her friend. “Oh that? I didn’t. I just did what I always do with my problems. I put them in a box.”
Twilight gave her friend a puzzled look.
“I mean I simply adore boxes. And I must.” Rarity stared at her friend with half-lidded daggers for eyes. “Boxes are my life. At least that’s what my cutie mark says.” She motioned her head towards her flank, proudly adorned with the same cardboard box on each side of her.
Twilight laughed nervously and looked every which way but Rarity, stopping when she glanced over the white unicorn’s shoulder.
“Luna?” asked Twilight, almost not daring to hope.
“Oh no you don’t missy,” chided Rarity, “I’m not falling for that. What did you do to my cutie mark?”
A voice behind her, one that Rarity had not heard in a long time, called out. “Hail, Princess Twilight Sparkle. Hail, Crystal Empress Rarity.”
Not believing her ears, Rarity turned around and was greeted by a rather peculiar sight.